John Wick for the married man.
Breaking BadlaunchedBob Odenkirkinto one of the great career pivots.
It’s a brisk 90-plus minutes, and Odenkirk does some outrageous things on a bus.
Bob Odenkirk in ‘Nobody’.Allen Fraser/Universal Pictures
ButNobody’s best instincts fall victim to shameless franchising.
This should be a nasty little B-movie, not a pilot episode for the nextJohn Wickseries.
Nobodyscreenwriter Derek Kolstad wrote all theWicks, and producer David Leitch co-directed the first one.
He’s the overlooked patriarch of a family that can’t quite stand him.
His wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen), is glamorously distant.
His co-workers don’t respect him.
When thieves break into his house and threaten his family, Hutchalmostfights them… but doesn’t.
That leaves his son Blake (Gage Munroe) furious at the wuss he calls dad.
The outpouring of black-ops fury that follows establishes Hutch is no mere nobody.
He tracks down the criminals, but that doesn’t even matter.
The movie’s centerpiece finds this very angry man on a lonely night looking for something to punch.
That’s when the Russians arrive.
The charm should be watching a somewhat regular guy like Odenkirk pulling these world-is-my-weapon moves.
I don’t think it spoils too much to say that Hutch has a secret past.
That kind of Hoard Mode cinema depends less on tension than style.
You know nothing too bad will happen to our hero.
What’s crucial ishowthose not-too-bad things happen, and what sort of hyperbolic kill-streaks he performs on his attackers.
A great scene sets up Yulian (Aleksei Serebryakov) as the gangster of gangsters.
Meanwhile, Hutch’s family comes around rather quickly to their father’s whole fight-everyone-all-the-time routine.
RZA eventually appears and his arrival involves a team-up with Hutch’s father, played byChristopher Lloyd.
ButNobodyalso foregrounds the most uncomfortableDeath Wish-y aspects of its premise.
And Odenkirk whittles his natural charm down to emotionless deadpan.
It’s wickless.C
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